politics

Earlier this week, the government shutdown was short-lived. Naturally, the base called out Democrats for “caving” because the base has been conditioned to believe that Democrats will bail at the first sign of trouble. I’ve been going back and forth on this all week, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Democrats didn’t play their hand as well as they could, but at the same time, they’re in an impossible position.

Yes, being the minority party, they can use the shutdown to try and extract certain concessions, and a bipartisan agreement for DREAMers isn’t the biggest ask in the world. It’s not like in 2013 when Republicans shut down the government in order to defund the Affordable Care Act as if Obama was going to ruin his signature achievement. That had, as you can imagine, zero bipartisan support. So the terms were different, but at the end of the day there are some hard truths at the center of this shutdown.

1) Even if Democrats were better at messaging (and for a party that has the support of Hollywood, no one ever seems to be able to give Aaron Sorkin a call), this is still a fight about immigrants, and a large portion of Americans may claim to be sympathetic to immigrants, but they don’t want to sacrifice anything for them. Americans don’t look to their government for empathy; they look to their government as “What have you done for me lately?” If Democrats had been smarter, they could have framed the problem as, “It’s not good when 800,000 jobs disappear,” or “These people contribute $3.4 billion to our economy, so maybe we should find a way to keep them here.” Instead, they framed it as a moral issue, and while they’re on the right side of the issue, the politics don’t support the action because too many Americans are selfish.

2) Democrats don’t control anything. Let’s assume that Mitch McConnell had caved and agreed that Graham-Durbin agreement had to be tied to spending. Then it moves to the House, and they’re a bunch of yahoos who definitely don’t care about shutting down the government. They would rant and rave about the DACA bill being a poison pill and that spending agreements should be separate from immigration and meanwhile Americans would just be getting angrier and angrier. Some liberals may argue that the anger would be directed at the Republicans, but I think that’s too rosy of an estimation. I think it would be directed at congress in general. Democrats don’t have to worry about liberals turning out in November. Weakening Trump will accomplish that; Democrats are worried about those people in 2016 who think the whole government is broken and that no one should be elected. Those people don’t show up, the status quo remains the same, and Republicans keep the House because of gerrymandering and incumbency rates.

3) If you’re really upset with how Democrats behaved, then the long game is on you. You have to get out there and start backing candidates who can win. I think far too many liberals threw up their hands in November 2016, assumed Clinton would win, and that life would continue on as normal. Welcome to 2018 where you actually have to work to accomplish what you want. That means knocking on doors, volunteering, and actually getting in the fight. Sorry, civil engagement is tough. Welcome to a democracy.

One final note: I believe that when it comes to politicans, they basically all (or mostly all) operate from a standpoint of self-preservation. It’s while they’ll take donations from anyone and avoid blame at all costs. You don’t get to keep your job for being noble. And if avoiding blame is half your job, then that means you have to pass the buck.

I think Schumer’s strategy here is to shift the blame to the House and Paul Ryan. Here’s how it works:

1) Immigration reform passes in the Senate.

2) It dies in the House because A) Paul Ryan wants to remain Speaker, so he won’t piss off the hardliners; B) White supremacist Steve King has a veto vote, so he can prevent the legislation from even coming to the floor.

3) Schumer is able to say, “See? If you care about these poor kids* then we can’t let the GOP maintain control of the House. The only way to help DREAMers is to elect Democrats.

In this way, Schumer had maximized his issue. First, he can’t be blamed if the bill gets out of the Senate and dies in the House (and it’s not like Mitch McConnell cares about the fortunes of Paul Ryan, especially since McConnell can read a poll and knows that the GOP will probably lose the House anyway), and if it dies in the House, then he has another way to campaign against the GOP.

The downside in all of this is that DREAMers get caught in the crossfire. It’s a position they never should have been in in the first place, but here we are. In an ideal world, we never would have had this problem to begin with because people would have voted for Clinton over a game show host, but so it goes. These are the cards we’ve been dealt, and while I would obviously love it if the Durbin-Graham bill, which isn’t ideal, but an acceptable compromise, passed, what we’re looking at here is a way for Democrats to reach the best outcome possible for the party because (and I hate to say this) with Trump in the White House, fascist Stephen Miller as a chief advisor, and a GOP majority in the House and Senate, saving DREAMers was a bit of a pipe dream. To act like a longer shutdown would have saved them is a nice thought, but I think it would be been more about posturing for the base than actually extracting concessions.

*They’re not kids; they’re in their mid-20s, but I’ll allow the rhetoric because it’s effective

We like to believe we’re the heroes of our own stories. We’re the protagonist, we have control, and we matter. And to an extent, that’s true. Our actions have meaning, we affect the people around us, and we are affected by them.

However, we only have so much impact, and for most of us, the world is largely indifferent to our actions. Some may find this depressing or that because they can’t control certain outcomes that things are hopeless. For me, I take comfort in my relative level of unimportance because it means I don’t have to stress out about things I can’t control.

I thought about this while reading Will Leitch’s great article about how we’ve forgotten how to fear, particularly with regards to nuclear war. My counter to this would be two-fold.

First, we haven’t forgotten HOW to fear as much as there’s now so many different things to fear. In 1983 when Testament was released, you didn’t have to worry about climate change, ISIS, mass shootings or any other variety of onslaught. It was like having only 3 TV channels and you watched the Nuclear Annihilation channel because that’s what was on. Now you have way more things to be terrified of, so nuclear war (which could certainly happen! I’m not dismissing it!) has to vie for attention among all the other things scaring us.

My second, and larger point, is that you just have to accept that in the event of nuclear war you will suffer and die and there’s nothing you can do about it. I was terrified of pandemics, but once I accepted that in the event of a pandemic I would simply be dead, I was able to watch Contagion relatively stress-free.

Stressing about things we can’t control doesn’t benefit anyone, and while fear can be useful, it can also be debilitating and cause us to make bad decisions (it’s also worth noting that in the midst of the Cold War, we ended up going to war in Vietnam and electing such luminaries as Nixon, so it’s not like knowing HOW to fear led us to better outcomes).

Do I think Trump will roast all of us in a nuclear holocaust? It’s possible, and it would be a fitting end to America—a leader elected on racism and greed (a reflection on our country’s original sin of slavery) obliterated by nuclear weapons (our final sin). But what can you do about it? Is it worth being anymore terrified than when the Bush administration had those idiotic color-coded terror threat levels?

These days, I find my fears tend to be more about what could happen to my loved ones or about my health or my career. My nightmares are, for the most part, comically mundane (I’ve had multiple dreams about the Falcons losing football games). That’s not to say that things aren’t bad or that they couldn’t get worse. It’s to say that unproductive fear is pointless, and that putting up signs for fallout shelters solves nothing.

I listen to Pod Save America on a frequent basis. It’s a good show, and it separates itself from the average punditocracy because its participants were recently in a functional White House. They know how things are supposed to work (as opposed to whomever CNN wants on a panel because they worked in the Clinton White House twenty years ago), and they’ve got good insights.

However, in their most recent episode, “Turd in the GOP Punchbowl”, they spend some time taking aim at Fox News, crying out that so many of our ills come from Fox News feeding a steady stream of bullshit to 40% of the populace. If only Fox News wasn’t there, they speculate, the scales would be lifted from the eyes of Trump’s base, and they would see him for the corrupt, tinpot tyrant he truly is.

Unfortunately, the evidence doesn’t follow.

You may recall that at the first GOP debate, which was hosted on Fox News, the network came down on him in a surprisingly harsh way. Vox reports that this was part of a concerted effort by Rupert Murdoch to get Trump out of the race because Murdoch disliked Trump’s anti-immigration policies. However, when Fox News viewers pushed back, Murdoch and Trump made up and Fox News’ coverage of Trump has been positive ever since.

There’s this notion that Fox News viewers are victims. They’re hapless Americans who have been brainwashed into believing a horrible agenda, and while that may be true for some, for the most part, you have to have a moral compass where Fox News already appeals to you. It’s not brainwashing; it’s confirmation bias. If you believe that immigrants are ruining the country, that Democrats are coming to take your guns, and that Obama and the Clintons are the devil, you have a channel that tells you “You’re right!” on a consistent basis.

And I get that. I listen to Pod Save America because they’re in tune with my liberal viewpoints. But, as this post shows, I don’t swallow everything they sell me. The only time Fox News viewers pushed back is when Fox News wasn’t hateful enough. They wanted Trump.

And that’s a tougher thing to reckon with, so I can understand why Pod Save America would rather turn the blame onto a corporate entity like Fox News rather than the American citizens who comprise Fox News’ viewership. But if you want to be honest with your listeners, you might need to confront the fact that Fox News isn’t the root of the problem. They’re a horrible network, bu they’re also profiting off a problem that would exist whether they were around or not.

Right now, Republicans are busy running interference for Trump as former acting Attorney General Sally Yates testifies about Michael Flynn’s ties to Russia. At this point, it’s fairly obvious there was some sort of connection between the Trump campaign and Russia, but the details are still foggy, and trying to discern them will likely lead you down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole.

So instead of trying to postulate about what exactly are the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia (information that will probably be slowly revealed over the following years rather than what someone vomits out in a tweetstorm), I’d like to offer a theory about why Republicans are bothering running interference for Trump in the first place. After all, he’s not their guy. He’s not a popular President. If they threw him under the bus and put in Mike Pence, they could probably enact their agenda with far less drama.

So why protect Trump? I think there are two reasons. The first is that Trump still controls the base. These are the people that have no regrets about voting Trump and haven’t really felt his wrath. They’re fine with the administration terrorizing immigrants and people of color, and while they wish Trump would tweet less (i.e. be less openly stupid), they want him to stay President…for now.

But Trump is everybody’s fool, which leads us to the second reason. If the policies enacted under Trump are wildly unpopular, then the GOP can throw him under the bus before the midterms. Keep in mind that most politicians at the national level don’t have ideology; they simply want to get reelected (this is an issue on the right and the left), and they’ll do anything to be reelected. So, for example, if the GOP’s poll numbers are bad around spring or summer 2018, then they’ll launch an investigation into Trump. By that point, the base will be suitably disappointed, and then the GOP can say that Trump was never a true Republican and that the GOP will always look into malfeasance. They sacrifice Trump to save their skins and buy another two years under a President Pence.

We’ve passed the 100 day mark in the Trump administration, and while there were fears that we would be plunged into an authoritarian state, it turns out that Trump is too lazy and stupid to make that happen. He has all the makings of a fascist except the part of actually figuring out how to make things happen. What’s disturbing is that it seems like our greatest bulwark against Trump’s cruelty is his stupidity. The man is so profoundly dumb that he can’t make anything happen. There was the fear that Steve Bannon would act as a Svengali and use Trump as a puppet for his white nationalistic goals, but it turns out that since Bannon was also kind of dumb and his initial plans backfired horribly, his role has been reduced.

Some are hoping that this is our new normal: incompetent kleptocracy. Simply put, Trump, due to his lack leadership and complete disinterest in policy details, will putter around miserably for four years as he modestly enriches himself and his family by going to Trump properties every weekend. He may even ram through a massive tax cut that would save him and his wealthy peers (I don’t say “friends” because Trump has no friends), but on the whole, the Republic will persevere and we’ll never make this kind of horrible mistake ever again.

That’s comforting, but it’s unlikely. Remember that for the first nine months of the George W. Bush presidency, he was seen as a largely comical figure. He almost choked on a pretzel. Trey Parker and Matt Stone made a sitcom parody called That’s My Bush! because he was viewed as a lovable dope. Then 9/11 happened and everything got a lot less funny.

So far, the Trump administration has been embroiled in chaos, and it’s all chaos of their own doing. To assume that this is the new normal is to assume that no external threat will emerge in the next four years. And it’s possible we’ll get ridiculously lucky and no major threat will emerge until an adult is in White House. But that’s a huge risk, and to simply assume that everything is going to be okay just because Trump’s first 100 days have been a (to borrow one of his favorite words) disaster is a mistake.

On the one hand, I don’t think we’re slowly plunging into authoritarianism. I understand the vigilance and I respect it, but I think Trump’s actions over the first 100 days have shown that he’s not playing 3D chess or even checkers. He struggles mightily with connect-the-dots. But if a true crisis emerges, that’s when we’ll be in even greater danger. I pray that day never comes and we can get to January 20, 2021 with a new, compassionate, and sane President.

So liberal Twitter today got into an internecine spat about Trump’s comments over Mike Pence being politely addressed by the cast at last night’s showing of Hamilton. Pence was booed by the audience, and then after the show, actor Brandon Dixon addressed the VP-Elect in a serious but respectful manner. The following morning, Trump, incensed that anyone would chastise a powerful white guy, said the cast was rude and that they should apologize. It was Trump being Trump, but it was worth noting his hypocrisy, weakness, and inability to let any slight go by unnoticed.

Or was it? There was then a counter uproar saying that people who cared about the Hamilton incident were being distracted from the Trump University fraud settlement and that Trump is getting richer by having foreign diplomats stay in his Washington, D.C. hotel. Trump was using social media as a distraction so people wouldn’t call him on settling the Trump U scandal even after he had previously promised he would never settle (Trump lied! It’s true!).

So we have liberals chastising liberals over the proper way to respond to which scandals, and saying that this is Trump’s genius strategy: throw so many problems at people that they can’t focus, and he can get away with everything. There are just a few problems with this.

1) If “Trump Wins by Being on Twitter” was true, then why did his staff force him off of it in the final weeks of the campaign? “Aides to Mr. Trump have finally wrested away the Twitter account that he used to colorfully — and often counterproductively — savage his rivals,” wrote the New York Times on November 6th. The more Trump opens his mouth, the more opportunities people have to attack him, and during the campaign, his aides were smart enough to realize that if he could just shut the fuck up for more than two weeks, the news cycle would consume Hillary Clinton. (This, by the way, is not the sole reason Clinton lost)

2) Trump may have a lot of issues, but it’s not your place to tell people what they can and can’t care about. People are scared and hurting right now, and trying to police that outrage is sanctimonious and counter-productive. Let’s go back to the campaign, and assume that if all liberals had just focused on one issue to the neglect of all others, then Trump would have lost. So what issue should it have been? His sexist comments? His racist comments? His lack of political experience? His dealings with Russia? The Trump University fraud? Who gets to decide what’s important to everyone? Do you want to be the one who tells a woman who was sexually assaulted, “Hey, it’s rough, but we’ve got to keep the focus on his ties to Russia.” Do you want to tell the Muslim man, “I know he wants to criminalize being Muslim, but we can only care about his sexual assault charges.”

Trump does pose a unique problem in that he is a non-stop (to borrow one of his few and favorite words) disaster. It is difficult to pin him down to any one thing, but that makes it more important for all of us to care about all of it. And I know that’s exhausting. I know that in the last 10 days, it’s been nightmarish, and it’s not going to get any easier. Life is going to be hard, and it’s going to suck for a while, but telling people what they can and can’t care about isn’t a solution. Every day is going to be a struggle, and there’s no saying, “You are only allowed to care about these things.” It’s incumbent on all of us to hold Trump and his administration accountable 24/7. If that means today we rail against him for chastising artists, wiggling out of a fraud trial, filling his cabinet with racists, and profiting off foreign diplomats staying at his hotel, then that’s what the day calls for. It’s not going to be easy, it’s not going to be fun, and there is no alternative.

When the DOMA and Prop 8 rulings were announced yesterday in favor of gay marriage, I was overjoyed…for about 20 minutes. I wasn’t particularly shocked since I deeply doubted that the Supreme Court would pull a Dred Scott and do something horrible. The tide of history was turning, and perhaps if this ruling had come to the court twenty years ago, it would have been against gay marriage or punted. But the possibility of this terrible outcome weighed far more heavily on the minds of gays and lesbians. Whether the Supreme Court ruled for or against gay marriage, my life would stay the same. Thankfully, the Supreme Court mostly did the right thing and provided a victory to the battle, but not the war.

And that’s why my enthusiasm faded after about 20 minutes. First, the ruling on Prop 8 was limited to California, and it was limited on the grounds of those who opposed it (the Mormon Church instead of the State) rather than the fundamental inequality of the proposition itself. That fundamental inequality was addressed in the DOMA ruling, but DOMA can only apply to places that have passed a bill allowing gay marriage—currently 13 states plus the District of Columbia. There are 37 states left, and they have laws on the books making gay marriage illegal.

My concern is that yesterday’s victory will seem like the conclusion of the fight rather than what it is: a major victory in an ongoing conflict. I think of my gay friends in Georgia, and if they want to get married, they can’t live here. The federal benefits now allowed by the DOMA ruling will not affect them until they can be married. Their fight continues, but it continues in a red state. And every red state, especially in the South, is far from allowing it.

So how does that fight continue? Is it now every state for itself? I don’t know how national coalitions for gay and lesbian rights will proceed, but I’m afraid that there may be a divide and conquer mentality where pro-gay rights groups in deeply red states won’t have the resources to even begin mounting a serious battle against the deeply entrenched forces allied against gay marriage.

It’s important to remember that the fight is far from over, and that a new national strategy is needed because the battle now begins in the individual states. Thankfully, three more states will be on the side of equality by the end of the summer: Delaware, Minnesota, and Rhode Island.

I just finished re-watching George Clooney’s Good Night, and GoodLuck. It was like stepping into a time machine, although not in the way of throwing back to 1953 and Edward R. Murrow’s fight against Joe McCarthy (not to dismiss the excellent historical portrayal of the era). It was a time machine into the Bush Administration, which is what the movie is really about. It was about a fiercely-divided America that had been fundamentally ruptured by the attacks of 9/11 and war-hungry response of the Bush Administration. We were at war not only with “terror”, but with each other. And our news couldn’t save us. The news we trusted helped facilitate a march towards war.

I was in college at the time, and being a college student is already far too quick with half-baked ideas. It’s the last time you can revel in the concept that you know everything (post-academic life quickly lets you know how little you know). I became a big fan of Michael Moore, because in the 2000s conflict, each side had its heroes. I look back and shake my head, but Clooney’s film, which I saw in my senior year, persists, while Moore is a joke.

Nevertheless, it was an intense time, and yet oddly simple. We saw the wedges and knew the problems insofar as the issues. There was a flood of information, but pro-war, anti-war was easy to understand. Meanwhile, there was a gathering financial storm that no one cared to notice, and now that we’re still suffering its aftershocks, we still don’t understand it. We know things are bad, but the reasons are too complicated, and intentionally so. You instinctively know that it’s bad for someone to fight and die on a lie. Or perhaps you’re persuaded by the “Fight them over there so we won’t have to fight them here,” argument. But how many people can explain a credit default swap and why that financial instrument was partially responsible for the downfall of our economic system. In a run-up to war, we will (hopefully) never again be so quick to accept information because we’re motivated by fear. But how do you stop a crime you don’t understand? Obama hasn’t taken any serious steps to punish those responsible for our economic collapse nor has he set up any measures to stop it from happening again. We still live in dangerous times. We just can’t clearly articulate it for a variety of reasons. There are so many distractions, so many opinions, and so many “facts” we glean from the Internet, the box that provides trivia and calls it knowledge.

Bush is gone and the world has tried to forget him (and he’s done his best to help), but I feel like we live in even more dangerous times. I don’t like thinking that because I know part of that fear is simply me getting older, getting stuck in my ways, looking at the future and fearing what’s to come. Namely, I fear a world where we’re all disconnected but think we’re closer than ever. Social networks will provide the illusion of intimacy just like a glance at a webpage or reading a single article will provide the illusion of knowledge rather the truth that we’re swimming in a sea of confirmation bias.

Earlier this week, the Bush Library opened its doors, but it was a small story (as such openings are) mixed in with news about flight delays caused by the sequester, and further developments in the case of the Boston bombers. The easy joke is to openly wonder if the Library contains a copy of “My Pet Goat”. I think back to 2005 when ridiculing and despising George W. Bush was a matter of course. I certainly don’t think Obama would have been elected without Bush. The extreme change of electing a black president couldn’t have been accomplished without a thoroughly reviled and unpopular previous president (it also didn’t hurt that Clinton ran a shit campaign, and McCain imploded by selecting Palin as his running mate). But our problems persist, but the political air isn’t thick in the same way. It’s the air of a stalemate rather than battle. Washington is broken, it’s broken behind closed doors, and the American people are exhausted from four years of intransigence.

Clooney tried to explore the difficulty of political change in his 2011 film, The Ides of March. It doesn’t really work since it’s a mixed metaphor where the movie is supposed to be about disillusionment, but because the disillusionment comes from such heightened circumstances (spoiler alert)–the candidate sleeping with a staffer and then the staffer committing suicide–it doesn’t ring true like Good Night, and Good Luck. It’s because it’s so much tougher to see where we are right now, and that’s the difficulty of the dramatization.

If I sound wistful for the days of Bush’s clear-cut-nation-dividing, I’m not. I’m absolutely rambling (but it’s for my personal blog, so who cares), but I wonder if I’ll be sitting alone on a Saturday night eight years from now, and looking back at a movie that makes me thinking about the 2010s, and the new kind of dread it inspired. Will it be about a herald leader not up to the task? Will it be about a political system that can no longer function because it’s been warped and twisted by time, culture, technology, and money?

Then I have to look at history, shake my head, and laugh a little bit because I feel silly. I feel that we have to hope because living in hopelessness is no way to live. Living in fear is no way to live. Of course, these sentiments are luxuries of a privileged life, and I write them sitting comfortably from my desk chair on my nice computer.

If I don’t stop soon, I’ll ramble on until dawn, so I’ll quickly finish by saying that on November 3, 2004, when Bush had been reelected, the world looked bleak. It’s almost ten years later, and we’re still here. Talking about what’s with us will keep me rambling until dawn.

We had the Olympics this past summer (where people seemed more focused on how NBC was ill-equipped to handle broadcasting time-delayed events in the digital age), but the real games begin this fall. Baseball playoffs are about to begin (go Braves!), football is in full swing (go Falcons!), and we’re about to have the Presidential debates (go America!).

If you don’t think politics is a game, you haven’t been paying attention. Policy is serious, but politics—particularly the way it’s covered—is a game. It’s a game that has far-reaching implications for the future of our country, but we hear about it in terms of a game. Who’s up? Who’s down? Who’s gaining? Who’s losing? Did Candidate X hit a home run with his speech? Did Candidate Y fumble the response to the question?

And tonight, the first of three Presidential debates begin. I hesitate to put the word “debates” into question marks because it seems too cynical. The candidates are responding to each other in real time, but the time is so short. Everything is condensed. Points and counter-points have to be rapidly delivered. But do these debates really tell us anything? The candidates are simply reiterating points they’ve been making for months. The format has changed, but the messages are the same.

But the debates matter for the small sliver of the population that somehow, for reasons that defy understanding, haven’t made up their minds. We’re not talking about Jack Johnson and John Jackson. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have fundamental disagreements on the direction for our government. If you believe that government has an obligation to help its people, then vote Democrat. If you believe that unregulated businesses benefit the country, then vote Republican. The differences regarding social issues couldn’t be clearer: Pro-choice or pro-life? Gay rights or discrimination? Expansion of health care or go broke and die? And on the issues where there’s no daylight between the candidates—war on drugs, prosecuting financial crimes—they’re not going to change their positions.

Nevertheless, the debates will dominate our media landscape for the next couple of weeks because that’s where the game is played. For those who couldn’t be bothered to do research into the candidates, they’ll now get the biggest political ad possible. And at the end, the punditry will squabble over who won. Who was the most eloquent, who stumbled over a question, and who now has the edge.

Except there will be no edge. Strangely enough, even though they’re designed to convince independent voters, debates don’t seriously sway presidential elections in the modern age. The candidates enter at their current popularity and they leave at about the same level. This is entertainment, and no one becomes a Texans fan simply because they played well on Sunday.

Looking at where the candidates currently stand, Obama wins the election. The chattering class can go on about how close it is, but they’re looking at the nationwide poll, which would be important if Presidents were elected by popular vote. But we use the Electoral College, and as you’ll see, Obama is almost at 270 electoral votes. On election night, Obama may not have dominated the popular vote, but according to polling guru Nate Silver, Obama is likely to win the election. Republicans will harp on the popular vote all day, but it won’t matter as long as Obama wins it by at least 50.1%.

So when you tune in for the debates, remember that we’re watching condensed stump speeches, and unnecessary ones at that. The best thing that could happen is if Obama’s opening statement was “I killed Bin Laden, and Mitt Romney hates 47% of America,” drops the mic and walks away. I’d vote for that.

A couple weeks ago, Dan Cathy, the President and COO of Chick-Fil-A, made the following statement on the Ken Coleman Show:

“We’re inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage. And I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude that thinks we have the audacity to redefine what marriage is all about.”

Dan Cathy is an idiot. He’s a bigot, and he’s on the wrong side of history. In 2004, George W. Bush was re-elected in part because Karl Rove was able to prey on homophobia and intolerance (and also by getting people to believe that a decorated veteran was less able to lead the country in a time of war than a guy who never saw a day of combat in his life). Eight years later, more states have legalized gay marriage, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is no more, the President came out in favor of gay marriage, and a nationwide movement began with “It Gets Better”.

But refusing to eat Chick-Fil-A on moral grounds isn’t part of turning the tide. Since Cathy’s statement, there has been an uprising on social networks chastising the corporation for its homophobic believes. Somehow, people were surprised that a business that’s closed on Sunday to observe the sabbath had deep ties to Christianity. This shock has led to not only Facebook and Twitter posts against Chick-Fil-A, but calls to boycott the business.

There seems to be a misunderstanding regarding the efficacy of boycotts. It’s a throwback to the 1960s when civil rights organizations boycotted segregated businesses. However, these businesses tended to be small, family-owned shops. If your restaurant was located in a neighborhood that was half-black and half-white, and all the black people stopped eating there, then you’ve lost 50% of your revenue, and you were forced to consider whether how much money you’d be willing to lose because of bigotry.

Boycotting a corporation like Chick-Fil-A, however, doesn’t register to them. While they obviously can’t ignore the media blowback from Cathy’s statement, there’s no way for them to measure how many people are boycotting. Maybe profits are lower because people are eating out less since the economy sucks. Maybe more competitive businesses are rising up around their locations. And how will Chick-Fil-A fix this problem? I doubt Dan Cathy will make an apology and even if he did, how many people would it bring back? Isn’t it easier to lay people off or raise prices? I assume if Chick-Fil-A’s profits dropped steeply, that would be their move because Dan Cathy’s convictions are stronger than the convictions of his detractors.

As I said, I think Dan Cathy’s views are despicable, but we should acknowledge that he’s willing to sacrifice millions of dollars for them. Chick-Fil-A could be making 1/7th more money than it makes now by being open on a Sunday. The bible says to take a day off for the sabbath, and Dan Cathy will abide by that commandment. His opponents, on the other hand, can’t be bothered to do more than not spend money on fast food.

This isn’t to say that people haven’t gone out to protest. If you picked up a sign, staged a sit-in, or did anything that required you to do more than sit at home, this post is not directed at you. I commend you on taking action, taking time out of your life, and showing people that you truly care about this issue. You have done far more than someone who posts a negative Chick-Fil-A meme on Facebook followed by a funny picture of an adorable animal.

Because we now live on the Internet, and are defined by how we share our beliefs and spend our money, then a simple post qualifies as protest. “I’m so angry, I shared someone else’s link.” We’re past the point of raising awareness (and again, if you weren’t aware that Chick-Fil-A’s management has Christian beliefs, then you weren’t really paying attention in the first place), so it’s really just to make yourself feel better. You’re pro-gay rights, and you lifted a finger to do something by clicking on your mouse. Well done.

I can’t stand that anymore. I can’t stand this unearned self-righteousness and people refusing to truly sacrifice for what they believe in. Honestly, I’m not that bothered by eating at Chick-Fil-A. As I said, history’s inexorable shift towards gay rights is unstoppable, and it doesn’t matter how much money Dan Cathy and his ilk donate to anti-gay organizations. They’re on the wrong side of history whether I buy an 8-piece chicken nuggets or not. I’ll support gay rights right now and you can too: click here to donate money to the It Gets Better Project.

“But if you’re pouring money into Chick-Fil-A’s coffers, then you’re just negating what you’re putting into It Gets Better!” a person I just made up might say. Except Chick-Fil-A is on the wrong side of history. I will happily give them money so I can watch them waste millions of it on a social issue they’re going to lose. Their money is poorly spent. It Gets Better’s money is wisely spent because they need momentum, and they will touch the lives of countless young people who will in turn support each other. Chick-Fil-A can’t create homophobes, so unless they’ve concocted an anti-aging formula that runs off intolerance, then the company can’t change the fact that homophobic people are the past and enlightened young people are the future.

However, if your argument is that you can’t in good conscience give money to a homophobic business, then that’s fine. But what are you willing to give your money to? In all likelihood, you own some piece of technology made in a factory in China. In China, they work long hours for slave wages in factories that are so bad that one corporation, Foxconn, had to put up suicide nets. Working conditions are so terrible, that they had to come up with a way to stop employees from killing themselves. Nets are cheaper than higher wages and decent working conditions.

If this bothers you, then I encourage you to throw away any piece of technology that was made on the backs of this kind of harsh labor. Chick-Fil-A might be against gay rights, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any suicide nets on the premises (I guess an argument could be made for the ball pit on the playground). Also, if you put gas in your car, then why do you support endangering our oceans? As we learned a couple years ago, deepwater drilling is incredibly hazardous, and conditions have not significantly improved since Deepwater Horizon.

Except giving up your technology or your car is sacrifice. It won’t stop tech companies from using cheap labor or oil companies from drilling, but you will feel that sacrifice every day because your life will be more difficult because of it. Circling back to Christianity, the notion of tithing doesn’t have a bad premise. If you were forced to give up 10% of your income to charity, you would most likely feel it. That’s sacrifice. That’s the courage of your convictions. Refusing to eat a chicken sandwich: not courageous.